Predicting Meteorite Impacts

February 15, 2013—Astrobiologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Kevin Hand explains how Asteroid DA-14 could be only the beginning of what we can expect from space. With more than a million such objects out there, what can be done to prevent a meteor strike like the one that crashed into Russia this morning?

Predicting Meteorite Impacts

February 15, 2013—Astrobiologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Kevin Hand explains how Asteroid DA-14 could be only the beginning of what we can expect from space. With more than a million such objects out there, what can be done to prevent a meteor strike like the one that crashed into Russia this morning?

So this little rock, DA-14, is coming alarmingly close to the surface of our planet and we're fortunate that it's not going to hit us. But it should serve as a bit of shot from across the bow from the solar system telling us, "Hey, you gotta look out for this stuff."

My name is Kevin Hand and I am a planetary scientist and astrobiologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and I was a 2011 National Geographic Emerging Explorer.

To give you a sense of how close DA-14 is going to come to the Earth on February 15th, it's only 18,000 miles. DA-14 is passing within the distance of many of our Earth-observing telecommunication satellites. If this DA-14 were to come down and hit somewhere in a major metropolitan area hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of people would be killed.

For objects that are less than a hundred meters, and this is a type of object that DA-14 is, the estimates are that there are more than one million such objects.

And so what do you do if you find out that is on a trajectory that's going to lead a direct impact with Earth? We would send some sort of probe out to this object and that probe would either knock into it, or attach to it and then fire some rockets to give this rock a little bit of nudge to change its trajectory. Once you put the thruster on the backend it kind of got a remote control asteroid.

Really what we need is some kind of space-based assets to go and look around in all directions, basically, and to sort of serve as our space guard for these objects that are hard to find and very populous.

Predicting Meteorite Impacts

February 15, 2013—Astrobiologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Kevin Hand explains how Asteroid DA-14 could be only the beginning of what we can expect from space. With more than a million such objects out there, what can be done to prevent a meteor strike like the one that crashed into Russia this morning?